So I've been playing and watching a lot of LOTR content.
Lets start with Draft. I've only done 3-4 of these, but I find the format to be a lot of fun. One of the things I find that makes a great draft format is when the usual drafting strategy of Bombs, Removal, Evasion goes completely out the window.
For example, if we look at Neon Dynasty, one of the greatest draft formats of all time. Because of Sagas, pinpoint removal got a lot worse. If you a direct burn spell (say Kami's Flare) on a flipped saga creature (Say the Life of Tetsuo Umezawa) then your opponent has gotten all the value out of the first 2 saga chapters, where you are just down 1 card. You've traded your 1 card for only part of their card. That's a bad exchange.
It lead to a format where 1 for 1 removal was a lot worse than normal, and you'd often find yourself picking cards over them that would just be very wrong in a normal draft format.
LOTR has the Ring Tempts You, which I think is an excellent limited keyword. It puts the format in a place where you might prioritize low power creatures to be able to block your opponents ring-bearer. The format also has a lot of synergy with legendary creatures and being able to make your tokens or one of your more disposable creatures into legends means that a lot of cards are better than they might seem on first sight.
As you can probably see, I've done a lot more thinking about Neon Dynasty than LOTR, but there you go.
The one ring has been seeing play everywhere it is possibly legal to do so. And while it might not be ban worthy in all of those places, it does lead to uninteresting play patterns. 4 mana for a Time Walk + Ancestral Recall is often the floor of this card. The fact that burden counters only hurt you in your upkeep means that if you activate the card draw multiple times a turn you aren't punished if you win the game that turn or say, play a second One Ring to get rid of all those burden counters.
The early results have it looking insane in Modern, but not quite as good in either Legacy or Vintage. There is a caveat on this statement though. Most of the results so far have been from MTGO where the card, when accessible at all, has been around 150tix each. And you often want to play with all 4 copies. But it looks like it is becoming more available there, and when it does we will be able to see the true power of the card more accurately.
As for in paper, the card is in bundles, and still around $80 for that copy. This reminds me, and I'm going to show how long I've been playing here, of back when Betrayers of Kamigawa came out. The card Umezawa's Jitte was in one of the preconstructed decks, the decks were sold out, and Jitte alone cost more than the deck. It happened in Darksteel too where there were 2 Skullclamps in one of the precons. The reason there are still Bundles available with the One Ring in them this time around is purely because magic no longer has RRP.
Orcish Bowmasters have also been dominating eternal play, but on the whole feels like it creates more interesting play patterns, at least to me. Though it does mean that decks revolving around 1-toughness creatures are doing a lot worse across the board, and that's probably not healthy for formats as a whole.
Anyways, that's me. I won't have an article for you next week, but hopefully the week after :).
- Rose Willis
